In many cases, it is useful to have some assurance that locations have been visited, e.g. by service personnel, inspectors, delivery drivers and other people on official business. Those people may wish to pretend that they have visited the locations, in order to save themselves time and effort, or conversely those people may wish to allay suspicion that they have not visited the locations by providing proof that they have. An inexpensive means for proving beyond reasonable doubt that people or entities have indeed visited one or more locations would have wide applicability in service industries and regulated environments.
There are many applications that can make use of proof that a physical location was visited, whether by a truck driver, an inspector, service personnel, nurse, doctor or other officials and people or automated devices. Since visiting locations physically can be onerous, there is an incentive for people to pretend that they have physically visited a location when they really have not, and this sort of shirking is a well-known cultural phenomenon with wasteful costs to society and organizations.
Conventional approaches using a global positioning system (GPS) have many drawbacks. For example, GPS is not accessible everywhere, especially inside buildings with multiple stories, perhaps underground and obscured by concrete. Also, it is easy to claim loss of GPS reception as the reason why there is lack of proof that a location was visited. Products, such as GPS jammers, have been used to trigger this, for example, by truckers who deviate from their route. Further, GPS has limited accuracy and does not itself provide any assurance of the time window of the visit. There is currently no way to guarantee that GPS coordinates are not simply invented or otherwise faked. Any attempt to cross-check that, for example, by using magnetic bearings correlated with the coordinates is subject to the limitation that knowledge of the right bearings is in principle public too and can be manipulated to match the supplied coordinates. Given the above-noted deficiencies of the current approaches, what is needed is an improved method and system for location tracking and assurance.